Jim Kunstler Warns "We've Not Yet Seen How Insane A Society Can Become Under Duress"

It may be as simple as this: voters look at the two parties and decide that they don’t want the nation to turn into a gigantic seminar on race and gender studies.

The Democratic Party doesn’t have a platform, it has a curriculum. The party wants to instruct everybody how to think and act. You will be tested regularly on the correctness of your thought. And if you fail or object, say goodbye to your livelihood.

That’s the main reason that the Golden Golem of Greatness plays so well in the forsaken flyover precincts of this troubled land. They are weary of being scolded for their “privilege” by the privileged undergraduates of the most elite campuses. And from there, of course, the astounding hypocrisy informs and infects Democratic politics up to the highest level — e.g. the mendacious sex hysteria engineered by Diane Feinstein and a corps of DC swamp lawyers in the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.

This year’s main gambit by the Democrats has been the niggerization of white people. Oh, did I say the wrong word? It happens to describe exactly what has gone on: the effort to make white people the object of contempt and loathing. You don’t have to look further than The New York Times and its hiring of Sarah Jeong as an editorial writer — after she was discovered to be the author of Twitter tweets that declared, “Cancel white people,” and “Oh man, It’s sick how much joy I get from being cruel to old white men,” and “dumbass fucking white people….” I’m wondering: is there any ambiguity there? By the way, a search of The Times website for “by Sarah Jeong” comes up absolutely empty, suggesting that they’ve published nothing written by her since she got hired. There’s a show of confidence in their integrity!

Unless the financial markets blow up conveniently by the end of business Monday morning, Mr. Trump will continue to bellow out his triumphs of economic management. Personally, I’m not persuaded this vaunted miracle boom is anything but the result of piling onto the national debt, one way or another — tax cuts, fiscal profligacy, “defense” spending. And nobody should trust the numbers coming out of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, since they don’t count the many people who have simply dropped out of job-seeking.

The nation is still slowly choking to death on the fatal combination of its suburban sprawl living arrangement, the tyranny of multinational corporations, the profitless Ponzi scheme of shale oil fracking, and the immersive dishonesty that has turned even medicine and education into deadly moneygrubbing rackets. That armature of grift has to collapse, and the collapse has already begun on the margins and is steadily working its way to the core, where even the hedge fund cowboys and masters-of-the-universe will end up gasping like stranded whales on the shoals of insolvency.

In the meantime, and even so, it is imperative to keep the Democratic Party from the levers of power. If elected, they will convert a necessary and inescapable Fourth Turning into a game show replay of the French Revolution, with overtones of the Spanish Inquisition. We have not nearly seen the end of how insane a society can become under duress. And the duress of living in a collapsing industrial economy is something that the world has hardly seen before. Why do you think so many people are opiating themselves into an early grave?

This country certainly deserves leadership that can inspire it to carry on, to find a way to live even within the austere terms presented by the collapse of old arrangements. It won’t be the end of the world, and finding new, workable arrangements for daily life will open new doors as the old ones close. None of the political figures onstage these days inspires much confidence in that proposition, or even appears to see what’s on the horizon. So the Democrats seek solace in their race and gender antics and the Republicans gaze longingly back at the year 1957, and the fate of the nation goes where it will.